Poetry

Sean Johnston

 “Poetry is the closest thing to silence, which alone on earth is as close as we can get to heaven.” — from “The Ditch Was Lit Like This”

In order to place themselves in their art, poets must return to their roots. This is Sean Johnston’s return to the roots – ancestral and poetic — that have shaped his language and his consciousness. Structured in five sections, the work interplays the convergence of memory and personal history. Although such a pattern is familiar ground in the world of poetry, Johnston’s movements to establish roots through his use of the anecdotal, unexpected, and profound are both wise and revealing. We are all invited to that universal moment where “there is always a man with a guitar/ somewhere/ and the response is either love returned or love withheld – that is, of course, if something has been risked.”

As with his prose, Johnston’s poetry strives for a kind of minimalism in which the written word leads the reader to discovery, rather than by pushing a didactic discovery of something he deems to be important. The images, lines, and to some extent, the subject matter establish trigger points for involvement. The line structures and breaks are as much about the poetic rhythm as they are about this kind of triggering where the reader is signalled that the meaning may be changed or altered in the coming line. There are significant patterns of line development within the work – some relying on prosaic conventions, others using a more traditional compact pace and meaning and forms such as gazhal or those familiar free verse patterns with short stanzas.

Allan Forrie

Patrick O'Rourke

Glen Sorestad, Editor

In the Clear showcases contemporary Canadian poetry that is accessible and wide-ranging in content and perspective. These poems reflect the geographical, ecological and social concerns of contemporary life and times in Canada, and many have a literary permanence because of their unique voice and exceptional craft. Readers who want a collection of poetry that is expansive in its human and social concerns will find this anthology indispensible.

"In the Clear is a testimony to the work and accomplishment of the people behind Thistledown Press."
— Canadian Book Review Annual

• Winner of the 1998 Saskatchewan Book Award for Publishing in Education!

*Teacher Resource Guide Available 

Paulette Dube

Paulette Dubé’s fifth book of poetry takes an intimate look at the movements made by animals and humans during a cycle of four seasons. The poems are rich in their simplicity, and convey the depth and mystery of the animal-human connection. Reverse anthropomorphism occurs and the humans come away having (un)learned something about the citizens of the forest while deepening an understanding of themselves. The poems stress that as a species we are lost and lonely without our connection to the land, but that this connection reverberates with consequences.

“Dubé writes that she ‘…loves this place without being romantic, witty or urbane about it…’ and this promise is delivered through every poem. There is an unaffected, refreshing candor in these poems that is simply stunning, if not, at times, devastating.” — Thomas Trofimuk, author of Waiting For Columbus

"Her poems most strongly suggest a real humility when faced with the natural world, how it gets on with life, both survives and lets go, and a gratitude for how it can heal human trauma." — Jan Horne, Prairie Fire Magazine 

Andrew Stubbs

Readers familiar with the kind of literary experimentation Samuel Beckett used in his play, Endgame, where people become suddenly aware of being both spectators and players in their own lives, will connect with Stubbs’ poetry immediately. Others will discover this phenomenon from his “characters” who reach out from their experiences to try to find meaning for how what has passed in their lives now locks them into their present and must somehow bring purpose to their future. Such is the opening suite of poems, Heloise/Abelard, based on the true 12th century story of Pierre Abelard and Heloise — the epitome of star-crossed lovers. Another template for Stubbs’ collection is a slate of poems that explore Daniel Paul Schreber, the 19th century German judge who recorded his mental illness in the book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, one of the most influential books on psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Other poems explore our contemporary world — which through its media interprets reality while it displaces it. Underpinning Stubbs’ work are the relentless questions of his family — his emotional archives, and the intersections with other peoples’ lives that complicate relationships.

Bernadette Wagner

Saskatchewan writer Bernadette Wagner’s first book is examination (and cross-examination) of place, heart, politics, the socio-placement of women in the land and their quest for spiritual grace and worth. The poems tell of personal encounters with death, sexual assault, children, family, hard work, and a woman’s transformation from a bad-luck existence into a meaningful new life. The book’s trajectory is from young girl to wise crone and the poems are divided into these sections accordingly — Maiden, Mother, Crone. Detailed images of mundane family homes, farms, and yards act as backdrop to the human discourse and at times counterpoint the emotional politics and heaviness of a life weighed down with routine and questionable value. The insightful and powerful forces turned loose by the narrator stir all the emotional cul de sacs she experiences.

Glen Sorestad

These narrative poems are coloured with both curiosity and nostalgia and framed in a personal montage. Sorestad’s free verse captures the flora and fauna, the natural rhythms and colour of Saskatchewan. Occasionally they are descriptions of urban and rural landscapes, other times they are evoked memories of people and places who have left marked imprints upon him. Celebrating the ordinary and seeing the mystery in all moments of life remains part of his poetic priority. The neighbourhood parks he walks in, the way the seasons change, how family life evolves, how parents think, and a wide array of how past events claim permanence in our lives — all are set to inviting narrative tones.

Susan Musgrave

When the World is Not Our Home includes nearly fifty poems by one of Canada’s most distinctive literary voices. Selected from titles published between 1985 and 2000, these poems issued in small print runs became quickly out of print and are often now only available through rare book collectors. Part diviner, part sorceress, but always direct, confident and humorous, Susan Musgrave reaffirms readers of her distinctive place in Canadian letters.

“Musgrave approaches her subject in the manner of Salvador Dali — she distorts reality until it approximates her bizarre vision of the world.” — The Globe and Mail

“Tapping into fears and subconscious yearnings has been Susan Musgrave’s trademark from her earliest work, Songs of the Sea Witch, where she found inspiration and direction in classical and aboriginal mythology. Now she is able to locate the mythic element anywhere, in a death, a ferry ride, a failed photographic expedition, even in reading someone’s else’s collected poems!” — BC Bookworld

“She casts a spell and haunts us...she is a mythmaker...within her beats a heart that welcomes flooding darkness in which to brew special magic.” — Montreal Gazette

John Livingstone Clark

In Man Reading “Woman Reading in Bath”, John Livingstone Clark creates a series of poetic meditations as responses to the work of Anne Szumigalski: specifically the poem entitled “Woman Reading in Bath”, in the book that shares the same name. Clark’s inspiration for this project was a question posed by the elder poet several times in her last few years: “Why do so many of my book titles have water in them?” For Clark, the poem “Woman Reading in Bath” reflects a number of major themes in her work, and by writing individual poems in relation to single lines (occasionally a couplet), the ‘mythopoesis’ of her work could be opened up in a book of poetry. Within this textual framework, Clark’s poems are dominated by the metaphor of a swimmer enveloped in a series of states and environments.

It would be understatement to say that these poems deal with loneliness, aloneness, and that final liminal state one experiences between life and death. The swimmer is a lonely man, but he accepts it as part of the rite of passage we must all make: moving from solid ground and social activity, to the beach with its visionary views, and finally the stage when one actually enters the water and moves out into a seemingly infinite ocean, beneath a tangibly infinite sky.
One of the main reasons Clark chose this poem of Szumigalski’s is its radical, though humorous, deconstruction of all patriarchal theologies. As suggested by the poem’s title, there really is a woman having a nice soak in the tub, but wouldn’t you know it — a Yahweh-like figure pops out of the water and starts throwing his weight around. It is in his responses to these poems that Clark moves into a very specific duel with the hegemony of Patriarchal Christianity.

From the personal to the universal, this collection is an ode to the harmonics of mind, body, and spirit. Why always about water? Characters and Selves within all of us beg to know, the swimmer reciprocates: the body is sixty-five percent H2O; the water breaks at birth; and in the unconscious process of Individuation, we are “drowning to life”.

Catherine Mamo

In Catherine Mamo’s debut poetry collection, is a woman quietly buried, like dormant grass under months of snow, in a routine agenda: make meals, water the cactus, turn the baby, pay the mortgage, and pick up son at 2:00 pm from swimming. However, this poetry hosts an extraordinary, worldly voice that lives beyond the banality of chores, and understands the immensity of origin and coexistence. Whether Mamo is observing the evolution of a hoverfly or is contrasting her picket fence life with a scene of the Ganges “where wild dogs gnaw on charred corpses” she installs a remarkable balance between the concrete and imaginable. Where the mundane blurs and confuses the self, a mother escapes through her poet exoskeleton. Or is she a poet with a mother’s exoskeleton? A woman who wakes in the night holding scribbled notes feels the earth pulsate around her, finds meditation in laundry and snow; in the Ma — the space between.

Paperwhite is sound-rich with hums and chants, where butterflies are harmonic and “coyotes howl like ambulances”, and where a woman stands at the intersection of her life: remembering passed lovers and escaped dangers, searching for mid-life enlightenment, and projecting the loneliness of aging.

Dennis Cooley

This powerful and evocative poem sequence reconstructs memory through pinpoint ancestral connections and personal history. The poetry is as fundamental as the southern prairie landscape in its stark realities, and progressively elemental in its distinctive risks with structure and imagery. It is roots poetry, humorous, anecdotal and wise, but also original, unexpected and profound. Cooley’s writing fiddles with forms, swerves among the vernacular, the comical, the meditative, the linguistic, and the personal. His work exudes a strong commitment to local and contemporary understandings of writing and a continued experimentation with his postmodernist leanings. correction line affirms Cooley’s desire to break from the inexorable narrative and offer poetry its place in the everyday world, while allowing its aesthetic to claim the space and time of the Canadian Prairies for its form, cadence and meanings. As the title suggests there are lines that correct what must change, as there are lines to correct what is already known. It is through this convergence of memory and history that Cooley’s poems shape understanding.

“ . . . Cooley being humble Cooley, you can almost never find most of [his] titles listed on his other books; never one to announce himself, but lets the poems do all the talking.” — rob mclennan, Vallum Magazine

Taylor Leedahl

Taylor Leedahl integrates the dynamic traditions of Western Canadian poetry with her evolving pop sensibility, and emerges with a bright and resonant new voice on the literary landscape. Here is a chronology of a girl, then a young woman, coming to age in a contemporary society that allows more psychological, educational, and sexual freedoms than ever before, and her poetic response as she exercises these liberties wherever and whenever she can.

“Taut with energy, these poems compel us to look up and outward — as the ‘blue sun tumbles’ and prairie ‘moon limbo[s]’ under the wide-eyed horizon. Leedahl’s crystalline observations are a 'white rip of truth' in a landscape where flora and fauna, humans and insects are busy ‘making business' of life.” — Mari-Lou Rowley

• Shortlisted for the 2008 Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry

Ian LeTourneau

Ian LeTourneau imagines history and memory as a glacial landscape that is both advancing and inert. The result is a collection where metaphor unfurls on a conveyor belt of precise language constructed to assemble the past we pretend not to remember, the future we try not to imagine, and the present we cannot escape. Terminal Moraine announces the arrival of an urgent new voice in Canadian poetry, one that embraces our myriad jagged landscapes, both personal and public, thawing and freezing.

Adrienne Gruber

This collection is the poet’s quest for exit signs, both mutual and solitary. Or is it an entrance she looks for through the forests of family and love, the changing landscapes of people, the shifting seasons? When nature is at work revealing and recovering, when who you were becomes who you are, there is clarity. These moments are captured as rituals that reveal the disharmony of existence; and the need for encounters with ghosts, both real and ethereal.

“There is sex, death and everything in between, which sums up the Uber Gruber’s poetry. How can she be both cheeky and wise at once? So sweet and sad and good?” — Susan Musgrave

“In poems that are fresh, quirky, poignant, amusing, and always unflinchingly honest, Adrienne Gruber confronts the ambiguities of intimacy and love. Her terrain is the ‘tender navigation’ of feelings for the living and the dead, for lovers, for family, even a beloved dog — in other words, what we find and what we lose as we journey through life.” — Judith Krause

Kelly-Anne Riess

Kelly-Anne Riess portrays women naked in loneliness and longing. She details our self-destructive nature and our inability to save ourselves once we’ve pursued love’s twisted, and dangerous, paths. But, there remains the indomitable human spirit’s ability to endure and come back for more and Riess’ poems capture that spirit in remarkable ways.

“In the contemporary social-scapes of Kelly-Anne Riess’ poems, paradise got lost a long time ago. Riess’ Eve is closer to Bridget Jones parachuted onto the streets of Regina. These are sly, wry, manic, and determinedly human poems for the new millennium. With a documentary eye and the poetic sensibility of a Jann Arden, Riess writes candidly about getting dumped, getting laid, and getting paid by ‘pasty/bosses with sausage-fat limbs who crumb/creativity like dried bread.’ A sassy debut.” — Jeanette Lynes, author of It’s Hard Being Queen: The Dusty Springfield Poems

Poems from this collection have been broadcast on Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion (American Public radio)

Heidi Garnett

Heidi Garnett’s Phosphorous is a poignant assertion of the ubiquitous nature of personal history.
Summoning the spirits and voices of those who suffered and endured the torments of Nazi Germany in World War II, Garnett relocates their moments of despair and suffering into poems of lament and reprieve. While family history simmers in the fragments of what is known and what isn’t, the unshakable knowledge of “skulls knitted together at the margins” informs the present. In all the rituals of immigration to Canada, and the journey west, and in the celebrations of acceptance, hard work and safety, the memories of the past are never far away. Through these biographical poems Garnett reminds us that though we “try to keep our distance” from the loss, pain and suffering of our histories, we cannot escape “the hooked branch that grafts the past/to now”.

Glen Sorestad

Glen Sorestad has been publishing poetry for thirty years and throughout his distinguished career he has relied upon the central themes of family, history, nature and friendship to guide his readers through his ever-expanding desire to name, and remember. Blood & Bone, Ice & Stone continues Sorestad’s poetic journey. Whether seeking his family roots in Norway, capturing the small epiphanies in nature as he travels, or shaping the memories of those whom he has met and befriended, his poems deliver a supple wisdom and unfettered honesty.

“Sorestad honours the ordinary in his poetry . . . helps us see meaning in everyday rituals.”
— JM.Bridgman, Prairie Fire

John Lent

Readers familiar with John Lent’s work will be drawn into Cantilevered Songs by his impressive ability to make poetry useful, not in the sense that it will solve problems, or create codes or alibis for how live. No. Useful in the sense that we all live somewhere, come from somewhere, hear things, see other things, and remember. When we share this with others as writers do, we transform the ordinary. We make it magical; make it important. This is Lent’s gift – to remind us all that we have lives worth thinking about; to remind us that our own backyards, roads home, work, play and love are uncommon wonders. This is what he means when he says: “Play that song. Play it again. Now, improvise,”

Lent’s poetry gains its energy from his own recognition of its usefulness as much as it gains its art from his own experiences with music, art, family friends and the his work as a teacher, musician and writer in the Okanagan. And while it is important to recognize his structured play with visual architecture, to make the poems resemble what they observe, to capture the cadence of those crazy personal mysteries, to hear the backbeat moments of when you catch a big and strange idea sideways and then it disappears, in the end it is the small, but beautiful, epiphany of feeling triumphant for no reason other than you have lived.

"I can think of no Canadian writer who so thoroughly positions us in front of the mirror that might offer us at once both reality and the imagined. It is to Lent that I turn when I need to be reminded, when I need to discover again, how the writer works in the daily world of place while aspiring to what endures.
He is there, the writer writing out of and in the present." — Robert Kroetsch

• Longlisted for the 2010 ReLit Award for Poetry

Paulette Dube

First Mountain is a interconnected suite of poems about a particular place — Jasper, Alberta. Paulette Dubé has lived there for more than a decade and her keen sense of the area and the healing powers of the natural world — seeking solitude, washing away stress, and celebrating the intimacy that is experienced by living in a pristine environment — shapes the emotional backbone of First Mountain. Dubé is at peak performance in her craft.

Glen Sorestad

Saskatoon's Glen Sorestad has published thirteen books of poetry in his career, and has been widely anthologized in Canada and the United States, as well as having many of his poems broadcast on CBC Radio.
He is Canada's first provincial poet laureate, appointed for a two-year term by the Government of Saskatchewan during which he will travel throughout the province, giving readings and talking with other writers, neophyte and professional, about his craft.

Leaving Holds Me Here includes 137 poems by Canada's first poet laureate. Edited and selected by John Newlove, this timely selection of the best of Glen Sorestad's poetry illustrates the stages of his writing, his concerns, and his development as a well-known Canadian poet.

Shelley A. Leedahl

From one of Canada's most talented authors comes a long-awaited second collection of poetry with something in it for everyone. Shelley A. Leedahl brings her deft craft with language, ear for the nuances of tone and careful observations of the everyday to a superb new collection of highly accessible poems.

Talking Down the Northern Lights delves into the intricacies of childhood and the complexities of family, marriage and contemporary life. Whether Leedahl is writing about the squeak of runners on the gymnasium floor or the thin noise of ice, strawberry daiquiris or wet tents drying, pregnancy tests or the new sheets from Zellers, readers are guaranteed a lyrical and entertaining ride.

Brenda Schmidt

Schmidt’s poetry is the Canadian wilderness. From the tundra to the prairies, it reads like a naturalist’s tour of the Canadian north. In language both deft and pure, Schmidt creates the relationships between external and internal landscapes, examining the impacts left by the travellers who seek the wealth of the north’s resources. More Than Three Feet Of Ice measures the non-renewable against the renewable, and the past against the present, in one of the last frontiers on earth. Praised by such contemporaries as Lorna Crozier, Brenda Schmidt has emerged as a distinctive voice, necessary and appropriate for the conscience of our time.

“Every once in a while a poet comes along whom you suddenly know you’ve been waiting for. Clear-eyed, original, imaginative. Brenda Schmidt is such a poet. She makes a familiar landscape unfamiliar in a most disarming way.” — Lorna Crozier

Charles Noble

In 1978 Press Porcepic published a slim volume by an emerging poet. The collection Haywire Rainbow was described as a collection in which “extravagant and exuberant language, brought together philosophy, emotion and lyricism.” For decades Charles Noble through his writing has wandered beyond the imagination’s limit, sallied from the safe language harbours, revelled in connotative abundance, immersed himself in philosophical phenomena, and earned his place in Canadian poetry.

Strikingly original, explorer, subterranean, and farmer-philosopher are other words that critics have been used to describe Charles Noble and his oeuvre published over the past forty years. An album of his inimitable work from 1972-2007, Sally O is the first retrospective of Noble’s literary expeditions. Enlightened with extensive author notes and commentary, this selected showcases Noble’s ability to be anything but conventional and establishes his presence in the post-modern arguments.

“Hearth Wild is brilliantly a poem, a document, an autobiography, a bejesus joy.” — Robert Kroetsch

“Such poems, full of intimate knowledge filtered through an intellectual screen, set Noble’s poems apart from the usual prairie anecdotal lyric.” — Douglas Barbour, Wild Words: Essays on Alberta Literature

“Built like a fullback, Noble exudes energy in his poems, which I might argue are like those of no one else writing in Canada today.” — John Ditsky, Western American Literature

“Some people have extraordinary peripheral vision. Supposedly it was such wide-angle viewing skills that helped Wayne Gretzky skate and score so well, for example. Banff author Charles Noble brings a similar wide-angle awareness to bear on language and meaning.” — Harry Vandervlist, Fast Forward

“[Noble]… travels much within his own Concord… [and even] “Planck lengths” — The scope is difficult to suggest in a short review... an innovative and profound examination of the relationship between language and its contexts...the role poetry can play in these unsettled times.” — Marc Thackray, Journal of Canadian Poetry

Of Let’s Hear It For Them:
“... smashed language ‘reflects’, one could well feel, smashed political hopes... At the same time, torqued language opens onto such fun, such wit... My claim would be that the Pound antenna, or the Cocteau / Spicer radio, was tuned into our ‘90’s, so far as these matters [free trade, GATT, high finance, farm subsidies etc] are concerned, by CN about a decade earlier...I don’t think the Canadian Long Poem comes any better than this.”
— John O. Thompson, Canadian Studies conference, University of Leeds.

Shelley A. Leedahl

"Leedahl's book may be the first I've read over the past year which I would confidently recommend for even the most avid poetry hater: the language and structure of these poems make them very easy to read...A Few Words for January could act as a handbook for what it's like to be from Saskatchewan." - Edmonton Journal.

 "Shelley Leedahl is the quintessential writer for the '90s." - Saskatoon Star Phoenix

This poetry collection will guarantee an enthusiastic student response — highly readable and relevant to all issues involving individuality and the study of Family issues.

Kathleen McCracken

A Geography of Souls is one of the most ambitious yet accessible poetry collections of the last ten years. Kathleen McCracken has a light touch and a dancing lyrical intellect, as she ranges through the generations, at war and in peacetime, uniting Native and European dreams with personal conduct and discovery. All through the book, like a ghost between the lines, roams the last wolf hunted down in the north of Ireland, where she currently lives and works.

Brenda Schmidt

These elegant lyrical poems are inspired by the fictional character of Flin Flon in J.E. Preston Muddock's 1905 novel The Sunless City, and the beautiful environs of the town bearing his name.
Language becomes a canvas upon which nature and a nameless human longing are entwined in a haunting wordscape of memory, love and desire.

Rita Bouvier

Rita Bouvier's Blueberry Clouds is a poignant exploration of the wellsprings of memory, language, and family that have shaped the contemporary experience of Aboriginal people in Canada. The violence and sustaining traditions of the past are brought into a single vision that revels in the power of the Cree and Mechif languages, eliciting a hope and beauty that is rooted in the rich history of Saskatchewan. Conversations with relatives, introspection, a love of the land, and a respect for values passed on through an extended family define this clear, humane voice.

This first book is invested with a spiritual belief and political awareness that make Rita Bouvier an original and provocative writer.

Carla Braidek

In this debut collection the taiga and boreal forests exist as a catalyst for poetry. Here the spruce and fir trees stand as sentries, while the poems, in acts of creative photosynthesis, invade the orderly tableau of ferns, moss, and the impassable snarl of deadfall and debris. The intimacy of living within one of the world’s largest remaining intact forest ecosystems is authentically captured and passionately shared in Carrying The Sun.

“Carla Braidek’s poetry celebrates the yearning, joy, fear, and uncertainty associated with humanness. With precision and originality, she weaves metaphor into the rich tapestry of a life lived in tandem with nature, a cloth both tough and soft to the touch. Skilfully, playfully, and with great vulnerability, Braidek leads the reader to a place of peace ‘where [the words] hide,’ her sense of wonder full of the threads of possibility.”
— Barbara Klar.

Sheri Benning

Earth After Rain flourishes in sensuous delight and plumbs the depth of topography, memory and family. Benning brings Saskatchewan’s boreal forests, lakes and fauna alive, absorbing detail and meshing it with the sinews of bone, the half-light of moon, and the silent majesty of stone.

S. D. Johnson

This collection of lyric poems explores the human experience in its metaphysical manifestations, drawing on the dynamic interrelationships of body and mind.
Johnson’s language is taut and graceful as she accesses the hidden mysteries of the phenomenal world.

“Johnson can touch you deeply, anger you, make you squirm. She’s a genuine weaver of words and emotions.” — Canadian Book Review Annual

Sherry Johnson is the author of one previous collection of poetry, Pale Grace (Thistledown, 1995), and her work has been widely published in literary magazines and journals across the country. Johnson currently resides in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

• Winner of the 2001 ReLit Award for Poetry

gillian harding russell

The title of this collection carries the urgent suggestion of withheld knowledge or something that has been suppressed but must be told. The poems reach out from the page with this narrative energy while maintaining an ironic weight of understatement. The collection is divided into five sections, each one offering its own collective theme, while together, like the fingers of a hand, combining for greater purpose.
I forgot to tell you guides the reader through a corridor of secrets where the mysterious and the mystical are whispered, then shouted, to move us to the intimacy that Russell shares with us.

Mari-Lou Rowley

Revelations, unnatural acts and errant reveries drive Mari-Lou Rowley’s third poetry collection. Her title serves notice to the reader that the poetry will be imbued with the retribution of tampering with nature.

These are not safe romantic lyrics or hybrid narratives; rather, they are the shadows of the unknown, the ominous acts of chance and coincidence. Interference with the Hydrangea evolves its own radiant energy — the way “a scream at night mingles with a dog’s bark,” the way a plant silently follows the sun.

Richard Stevenson

Live Evil: A Homage to Miles Davis is an extended poem sequence based on the life and works of Miles Davis which braids a strong narrative life-line and lyric responses to key recordings. The poetry morphs to match the periods and styles of Davis' jazz, from bebop through hard bop, cool, third stream, modal, funk, fusion and doo bop.

Clive Doucet

Looking for Henry is a long poem sequence which, through its search for “missing” Métis painter Henry Letendre, becomes a search for self, for history and for the intricate weave of Métis, Acadian and Micmac destinies and dispossessions.

In this original, compelling book, Doucet delves into his own Cape Breton Acadian roots and through Letendre's paintings and ancestry parallels the sad histories of the Métis and Acadien people.

“The ground was different [at Batoche], the earth much softer, and richer than it was back home. I took my shoes off and ran over the ground barefoot like a child, amazed at the velvet feeling of the deep, prairie soil and the complex sense of this being a pivotal place in the evolution of our nation.”

Veryl Coghill

Make Me is impulsive and eloquent poetic medicine. Addressing relationship breakdown, Coghill creates poems that welcome and reflect upon the doors to creativity that allow for emotional venting and trouble bashing. The result is a poetic manifesto for taking control of one’s life that clearly connects with the reader in a blushing intimacy. The real triumph here is that the poems in Make Me serve as a biting alternative to self pity.

“No gentle poetry this — sexy, raw, intimate, unafraid to take risks. Coghill takes the reader on a journey that leads to a renewal of the spirit, a journey filled with intense passion and resolute courage. These are poems you won’t soon forget.” — Lynda Monahan

John V. Hicks

“Hicks uses language with the precision and grace of an artist who has gained understanding and mastery of his medium....”
– Calgary Herald.

Reviews

Burke, Anne. Canadian Book Review Annual (1993): 210.
Diehl-Jones, Charlene. “Cafe companions.” Books in Canada (March 1993): 50.
Forbes, Alexander M. “Chiaroscuro.” Books in Review (October 1993): 183-4.

Terry Watada

Terry Watada crafts an artful mix of Buddhist tradition, Japanese-infused language and rich cultural history, where death is but one stop in the cyclical, timeless nature of a life. His is a warm tribute to the thin veil between worlds where sorrow is as transient as happiness. Obon: The Festival of the Dead is a celebration of people who endure through poverty and prejudice while they deftly and memorably evoke the traditions that redeem and define them. Deploying a remarkable balance between line and space, Watada’s span of syntax and diction are striking. Whether writing about drug addiction, forced labour, jazz, or the reveries of Japanese values, Watada measures the impact of each poem as carefully as a well-placed stone in the Ryoan-ji, or an arranged paper lantern in the Urabon. Obon: The Festival of the Dead is honest communion that bids ancestral voices to speak from every page, spreading their illumination long after the poetic moment, long after the season of Obon has ended.

John V. Hicks

Overheard by Conifers is John V. Hicks' ninth volume of poetry, and he is, quite simply, one of the greatest living Canadian poets.

“It is not an exaggeration to say that each poem is a work of art...Hicks follows in the Great Tradition of the masters.” — Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature.

Reviews

Robertson, Bill. “Saskatchewan poets have stories to tell.” Saskatoon Star-Phoenix . January 18, 1997. C11.
Smith, Steven Ross. Prairie Fire 18.2 (Summer 1997): 121-2.
Terfloth, Barbara F. E. “Quiet book speaks volumes.” Prince Albert Daily Herald . November 22, 1996. 10.

S. D. Johnson

“Johnson can touch you deeply, anger you, make you squirm. She's a genuine weaver of words and emotions...and her strong voice and poetic talent are undeniable.” — Canadian Book Review Annual.

 Reviews

Robertson, Bill. “Emerging writers get chance to shine.” Saskatoon Star-Phoenix . January 13, 1996. C15.
Shea, Theresa. “Leafing out.” NeWest Review (February/March 1996): 23-4.
St. Jacques, Elizabeth. Canadian Book Reviews Annual (July 1996): 3178.

Rita Bouvier

papîyâhtak:
To act in a thoughtful way,
To act in a respectful way,
To act in a joyful way,
To act in a balanced way

Through the healing medicine of language, Rita Bouvier leads the reader into the world of the Métis and Cree to experience first hand the wisdom and generosity that she inherited in her birthright. Some of these poems are steeped in the tradition of the dramatic monologue; others are used as dialogue anchors to the rich oral traditions of First Nations people. Throughout all, though, is the subtle but confident voice of Rita Bouvier who, like a spirit guide, leads the reader into a cultural place where wisdom comes from children, and laughter from elders. In papîyâhtak poetry is used to “forge a vision that many can embrace”.

John Livingstone Clark

Poems From A Broken Body leads the reader through poems engraved with heightened intellect and characterized by perceptions of pain. At times underscoring the sensitivity of genius and in counterpoint, the ignorance of the insensitive world, Clark’s work attempts to bring closure to an understanding of the “burden of self”. His poems are epitomized by spiritual energy and surreal imagery and are always carefully measured for line, breath and impact. This, his eighth book of poetry, is his most experimental.

Jennifer Still

Saltations suggests how we evolve into the complex spirits and personalities of our adulthood, and “where am I now” becomes a reflective mantra in living. With textual dexterity and verbal intelligence, Still moves through prairie landscapes, flora and fauna, in intricate metaphors shrewdly worked for their resonance and harmony, and balances their weight with earthy, familiar universals of the human condition. These are poems of unmistakable quality and consistency, poems that herald a significant new poet.

Jennifer Still’s lyric poetry investigates the ancestral forces and early family memories needed to form the speciation of self. Saltations

“Based on the inheritance of a salt doll figurine from the poet's late great-great grandmother, these poems are leaps of the heart, palpitations of memory that attempt to reconcile the inheritances and the losses that flow through a bloodline of generations of women . . . ” — Steven Ross Smith

Wynne Nicholson

Wynne Nicholson, in this debut collection, writes of healing through journaling, and grieving through the privilege of language. While carving her niche in the long poetic tradition of confronting personal loss through art, the poems in Small Gifts swell with acceptance of the dreams, memories, and trusts that a mother’s death leaves behind. The resulting poetic experience is genuinely uplifting and humble.

“Wynne Nicholson’s poems find ‘small gifts’, diamond sharded snow, perfumed pine cones, cricket songs, African violets in bloom, amoung the tangled threads of a family disintegrating. Grief songs, reaching for love.” — Di Brandt.

Holly Luhning

Drawn from the diversity of her prairie roots, east coast experience, and world travel, Luhning measures her poems in details of how place shapes language. Blind fish swim in ancient streams, glaciers ebb and flow faithful to fluidity, hoar frost hugs the power poles — all for a reason. Sway defines Thistledown’s New Leaf Series — fresh language, impacting structural imagery, and a consistent, distinctive voice.

Terry Watada

This beautiful collection of lyrical poems explores the dynamic interaction of Japanese and Canadian cultures, utilizing the powerful and universal elements of weather, art and family.
Watada's poetry moves through music, fine art, religion and memory as he explores the languages and landscapes within which the Japanese-Canadian experience takes place, and through which it is expressed.
Stylistically fluid and graceful, Ten Thousand Views of Rain evokes a world in which tradition and modern life mesh through a compelling imagination.

Russell Thornton

Distinguished by its lyricism, depth of emotion, its metaphysical bent and the colour and wide range of reference in its imagery, The Fifth Window, opens up new vistas of language and experience. The landscape and climate of Vancouver and the BC coast imbue this collection with a spiritual and physical immediacy and energy. The area's trees, mountains, rivers, creeks and rain inform an ecstatic vision in which the psyche and natural world meet and become one. With this collection Russell Thornton is certainly emerging as one of Canada's premiere poets.

Paulette Dube

“This is a book showing tremendous awareness of language and an acute interest in character and situation.”
– Canadian Book Review Annual.

• Winner of the 1994 Milton Acorn Memorial People's Poetry Award.

Reviews

Almon, Bert. Canadian Book Review Annual (1993): 205.
English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 75.3 (May 1994): 279.
van Luven, Lynne. “Voices from the past.” Edmonton Journal . July 5, 1992.

Tracy Hamon

While feminist writers may have transformed the thinking on women’s traditional role in domesticity, Tracy Hamon’s poetry arcs into its own territory, forged through a street-smart savvy and a composed grace. This Is Not Eden is imbued with a hunger for natural landscape and an instinctual grasp of reality that allow Hamon’s distinctive voice to belie her first book status.

“Tracy Hamon’s voice is so distinctive, lyrical and seductive, it’s hard to believe this is her first collection. These fluid musical poems are full of lush sounds and memorable images. Who else would compare the noise of a plow clearing snow from a parking lot in the middle of night to that of ardour, as the ‘tongue of a machine/presses it way/down the flat asphalt belly/licking a clear path?’ Whether in the bedroom or in the garden, passion and desire fuel Hamon’s imagination. Her poems explore the domestic and the wild — they are, by turns, playful, serious and provocative. Like the best of gifts, they stun us with their generous, unexpected pleasures.” — Judith Krause

Glen Sorestad

“Glen Sorestad is a leading figure in Prairie literature, and this is his ninth collection of poetry.” — Canadian Materials.

Reviews

Hall, Phil. “Gradations of Expense.” Books in Canada (April 1992): 48-9.
Maignon, L. Canadian Materials (May 1992): 176.
Martindale, Sheila. BOGG. Reviews Issue No. 66 (Summer 1993): 5.
Vaisius, Andrew. Prairie Fire 13.4: 111-2.
Robertson, Bill. “Wisdom gained at a price.” Saskatoon Star-Phoenix . December 21, 1991. C11.

Lia Pas

The poems in what is this place we have come to are soft incantations, wisps of song and dull-throated sighs. They are whispers, and mantras, made by the wind, or by the narrator's breath — her inspiration, her delivery of life. In between are the fables and the paean of myth that set a narrative framework behind this ethereal coda.

Peter Christensen

The Western Canadian landscape informs this accessible and passionate collection of lyric poetry with an adventurous spirit as Peter Christensen engages with the experiences and adventures — physical, emotional and intellectual — that nature and language provide. Stylistically innovative, imbued with extraordinary imagery, and thematically challenging, this new collection from one of Canada's premiere poets demonstrates how vital the poet's craft still is in our time.

John Lent

“John Lent's suite of stories and poems is a disarming and pleasing work that resists categorization.” – Malahat Review.

Reviews
Leblanc, John. “Male Expression.” Canadian Literature (November 1992): 179-181.
Clemence, Verne. “New writers reap rewards for Thistledown.” Saskatoon StarPhoenix. December 15, 1990.
Kelly, Elinor. Canadian Materials (March 1991): 128.
Kenyon, Michael. Malahat Review (April 1991): 108-9.
Moyles, R.G. Canadian Book Review Annual (1990): 196.
St. Jacques, Elizabeth. Freelance (December/January 1991-2): 38.
Gom, Leona. “Thistledown titles worthwhile fiction.” Edmonton Journal . June 16, 1991.

Thistledown Press, eds.

Batoche and Riel have evoked and provoked a diversity of responses from some of Canada's finest poets over the past century, and this groundbreaking anthology presents them in one volume.
This anthology is a must for all students engaged in the study of the Canadian Identity.

“No Feather, No Ink...gives us a good sampling of the first hundred years in the Canadian consciousness.”
— Poetry Canada Review

Reviews

Almon, Bert. Poetry Canada Review (Summer 1986): 52-3. – Books in Canada (March 1986): 42.
Davey, Frank. “Real Riel.” Canadian Literature no. 111 (Winter 1986): 176-8
Flanagan, Thomas. “Louis Riel: a review essay.” Journal of Canadian Studies 21.2 (Summer 1986): 157-64.
In Search of Canadian Materials (1987): 39
Journal of Commonwealth Literature 21.2 (1986): 54-5
Klooss, Wolfgang. Malahat Review no. 77 (December 1986): 141-3
Lynch, Gerald. Journal of Canadian Poetry. vol 2 (1987): 55-7
Marken, Ronald. CBC-Regina “Ambience.” November 1985
Nowlan, Michael O. Canadian Book Review Annual (1985): 190
Shay, Timothy. “Poetic justice.” Books in Canada (January/February 1986): 29-30
Sutherland, Fraser. “Poetry: prairie fluff and social Rielism.” Globe and Mail. January 11, 1986.

An anthology of new poetry celebrating Thistledown's first decade of literary publishing. The work of 37 poets is included, ranging from the intensely lyrical to the narrative and anecdotal— a potpourri of engaging visions and lively language. Authors represented include Lorna Crozier, John V. Hicks, Patrick Lane, Monty Reid, Glen Sorestad, and Eva Tihanyi.

“Dancing Visions is rich with quality selections from an impressive cross-section of Canadian poets.”
– Poetry Canada Review.

 Reviews

In Search of Canadian Materials (1987): 40
Kent, David. Canadian Book Review Annual (1985): 170
Library Materials Guide (1987): 100
Marken, Ronald. CBC-AM Regina. November 1985
Markin, Allan. Poetry Canada Review 8.2,3 (Spring 1987)
Moulton-Barrett, Donalee. Canadian Materials 14.3 (May 1986)
Sutherland, Fraser. “Poetry: prairie fluff and social Rielism.” The Globe and Mail. January 11, 1986

Patrick Lane

In this collection Patrick Lane continues his pursuit of poetic integrity through a unique and engaging series of meditations.

John V. Hicks

John V. Hicks' fourth book of poetry attests to his mastery of language and the wisdom of a life sensitively lived. 

John V. Hicks

John V. Hicks assembled Sticks and Strings with the same precise and artful style given all his poetry.
Called the greatest Canadian lyrical poet of the last fifty years, Hicks was for most of his life better known and admired on the international writing stage than he was in Canada. A prolific writer with a master’s tome of perfect poems, Sticks and Strings allows those who would write poetry the opportunity to study how the measure and leap of line is bound to both inspiration and intellect, and those who love to read poetry the opportunity to witness the classic, ancient art of literature put to modern practice.

128 pages/trade paper

“I challenge any living poet to write as fluidly as this.” — Irish Independent

“Strikingly original...a poet to be reckoned with.” — British Book News.

Reviews

McCracken, Kathleen. “Masks and voices: dramatic personas in the poetry of Paul Durcan.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 8.1: 107-120.
“Out of rhyme with Ireland.” Guardian . December 31, 1985. 13.

Don Gayton

Man Facing West presents a collection of fiction and nonfiction, sewn together with traces of autobiography. This collection is part of Don Gayton’s ongoing life journal, recounting moments of his boyhood in the United States and the Peace Corps, and detailing his opinions regarding the draft and the Vietnam War. Guiding these accounts are the forces of science and geology that have shaped Gayton’s career in Canada.

As his stories of scheming university students, prodding 19th century scientists, and geologists time-tunneling into the prehistoric past of the prairies appear, we are always aware of Gayton’s ability to transform science into magic.

Sara Berkeley

Home Movie Nights continues the rich evocation of landscape which Sara Berkely made distinctly her own in Penn, a world without frontiers and barriers that recalls "the kind of poetry written in Eastern Europe and Germany after the Second World War, poems unequalled in their delineation of, and witness to, new levels of human consciousness."

Sara Berkeley makes her prose debut with The Swimmer in the Deep Blue Dream, an extraordinary and varied collection of short stories with "a great sense of expansion and eloquence".

Alden Nowlan

The Gardens of the Wind is a limited edition of 150 copies, the first 26 lettered A - Z and specially bound. The remaining 124 copies were copied. All are signed by the author.

The book is illustrated by Governor General's Award winner Patrick Lane.